When the Los Angeles fire chief was caught out this week as it became clear that his engines’ “response times” had nothing to do with reality and everything to do with computer projections, he was actually carrying on in a grand bureaucratic tradition.

Not grand as in the sense of good. Grand as in par for the course for organizations for whom an obfuscation is as good as the facts – close enough for government work.

Even high priests of the every-decade Census have argued in the past for the right to project the numbers of, rather than to actually count, Americans.

To most of us, that sounds just plumb crazy – not to mention the telling of a kind of a lie when the truth was available.

But to statisticians of a certain subtle ilk, to project rather than to go with real numbers is actually to get much closer to the truth that we all claim is our goal.

The Census, these math whizzes note, is key to the apportionment of congressional and other political seats and district boundaries, and to monies from government agencies.

Writing in 1997, Duane Steffey, then an associate professor of statistics at San Diego State, determined that Latinos in a Census were demonstrably likely to be undercounted at a rate of 5 percent, compared to just 0.7 percent for “non-Hispanic whites.”

Since that’s the case, he argued, the then-upcoming 2000 Census would miss between 1.0 and 1.2 million Californians, or about 3 percent of the population.

So, which would be fairer – “counting” or “projecting”?

It is perhaps a subject more suited to an upper-division philosophy course than a seminar in statistics.

The point for us is to simply be both wary and open-minded when it comes to discussions of truth in numbers, which are as subject to manipulation as anything else. Understand that when an “official” instantaneously, and miraculously, declares a burned-out building to be “a $750,000 loss,” we’re talking wild guess-timates here. Understand that when a festival spokesman declares an economic benefit of “$1.2 million” because “some 12,000 folks” were in attendance, we are in the realm of wishful thinking.

When it comes to fire-response times, we’re in favor of real numbers instead of computer projections. Our smaller local city and county fire chiefs are always talking about such numbers, and they become a political hot potato here, too.

In the first place, there’s no need to project when real numbers are available. The call comes in at minute X, and the firefighters and EMTs arrive at minute Y. This is not a situation of potential undercounting of ethnic groups. There are records of these realities.

Join the Conversation

We invite you to use our commenting platform to engage in insightful conversations about issues in our community. Although we do not pre-screen comments, we reserve the right at all times to remove any information or materials that are unlawful, threatening, abusive, libelous, defamatory, obscene, vulgar, pornographic, profane, indecent or otherwise objectionable to us, and to disclose any information necessary to satisfy the law, regulation, or government request. We might permanently block any user who abuses these conditions.

If you see comments that you find offensive, please use the “Flag as Inappropriate” feature by hovering over the right side of the post, and pulling down on the arrow that appears. Or, contact our editors by emailing moderator@scng.com.